Apologies if I have missed it elsewhere, but what will be the process for dealing with violators?
Bringing this discussion from Aside in here along with thinking about how we deal with violations/violators.
In my opinion, one of the primary roles of moderators isn't just to deal with moderators, but to help defuse situations. A lot of issues in regular discussion arise from heated discussions getting more and more, well, heated.
The first step in that case is for a moderator to post in the thread, reminding people of the rules and asking them to cool things down.
The next step would be (temporarily) locking the thread.
For cases where a poster isn't responsive to taking a step back and cooling off or where there's a trend (targeted harassment, following a user from thread to thread attacking them), then the proper step would be to move to an official warning, then a suspension, and finally in really extreme situations, a ban.
And in my mind the cases for a ban need to be truly egregious.
Different forums have different policies on moderators deleting or modifying posts: I'm personally against it unless there's case to be made that the post, in itself, is doing harm simply by being there- like a poster's real identity being outed. Otherwise, I think posts with a warning serve as a reminder and shouldn't be erased.